I first found out about Kingdom Hearts when I was in fifth grade, through a Disney channel commercial around 2002.
The game was the sole reason that I even owned a PlayStation 2 that Christmas, as up to that point I was a devoted Nintendo kid raised on the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, who only knew of PlayStation previously as "that system with Digimon World."
The entire circumstances surrounding how I came into the series are
strange and entirely avoidable; I was only able to watch the Disney
channel because we had installed cable for the first time since second
grade, something that my parents weren't entirely resolved toward, and
without my sister's direct intervention I never would have gotten KH in
the first place because my parents were pretty much ignorant of what
games I wanted. I finally received Hearts as a birthday present in March
2003 from my sister, at which point I had never before played a Final
Fantasy game and was there purely because I wanted to fly through
Neverland like in the commercials. My sister did a big "I
told you so" number on my parents.
Yes, let me emphasize the point that I had
absolutely no idea what Final Fantasy even was and had zero interest in the internet at the time. This had...consequences.
Kingdom Hearts and Hearts II both give you the option of choosing a sword, a staff or a shield at the start of your playthrough. Hearts gives more options in this regard in that it doesn't just let you choose one strength, it
makes you choose another as your weakness, and your strengths individualize your particular Sora much moreso than they do in II. II is dumb.
I will be playing a
staff Sora; while each item confers bonuses that are not available "without" them, the sword that everyone picked as a kid is in reality the worst option because its special "bonus" is two extra item slots. This is garbage. The shield gives you three
of those, and it gives you Second Chance at level 18, 30 and 33 levels below where you would get it in a staff or sword playthrough. It's entirely possible to beat Kingdom Hearts' maingame without ever getting that ability in a different playthrough, so the fact that shield glues a postgame ability to Sora at a time when you're probably going up against Clayton and Stealth Sneak really downplays any offensive benefits that the sword could confer on you. (I'm not even sure that I ever
used Blitz.)
The staff is the best choice of them all because its bonus is +2 maximum MP. Magic points are the only core stat that you cannot cap using stat boosting items or equipment alone--a staff playthrough is
the only way to get those last 2 MP. This may seem insignificant, but magic is actually the most important stat in the original Kingdom Hearts, surpassing both strength and defense because of how the magic formulas work out. I will get to why when we pick up real spells.
After much deliberation I have decided to give up the
sword. While the points in defense are not really key to Kingdom Hearts because you can avoid all but one attack in the entire game using the analog stick, in the early game it can be problematic to go up against enemies with a base defense of 1 and because of how bonus XP is awarded, you will in the long run gain levels faster by dealing less damage to enemies. We'll actually see an example in action by the end of this update!
(Most of the screenshots in Awakening through Destiny Islands came from my initial run where I dropped the shield instead and played more hastily, but after reviewing the material I had I went back and these were my final decisions. This is why the HP values are wrong for a lot of screenshots.)
Next up in customizing our keywielder is experience progression. These conversations actually come up later on in the franchise, and if their use there is any indication the "canonical" answer to this question is "Friendship" but the remaining two are ambiguous because the
exact answer isn't present here. Just based on the position of the answers, I'd guess it's "broaden my horizons" and "being indecisive" but the customization is really more about linking the player's experience to the gameplay than it is picking one canon path.
There are three ways that answering Selphie, Tidus and Wakka's questions can go; you begin at dawn, begin at midday, or begin in the dead of night. This is really a measure of how quickly you level up, with dawn providing easy leveling at lower levels but petering out into a serious grind after level 50, midday requiring a steady amount of XP for all levelups, and night giving you slower levelups prior to L50 and faster ones after.
A side effect of this setup is that beginning at night causes you to need about 100,000 XP
less than if you began at dawn, so while in a normal maingame playthrough where I was just looking to defeat the evil wizard at the end of the game, I would probably go for a shield-dawn setup, in here we're going for a serious postgame file.
That means we're more concerned with spending less time grinding experience points.
And I begin the first step to becoming Keyblade Master. So now that our preliminary setup is out of the way, how does Sora actually play?
In comparison to other Keyblade wielders, Sora has not the fastest nor the slowest groundspeed in the series and comes with one of the better basic combos. The first two hits deal a lot more relative damage than they will in II, while his finisher is powerful but swings him too far forward and leaves him dangerously exposed to counterattack. Part of smart fighting with Sora is recognizing exactly when an enemy is going to be finished, because you don't want to launch into a finisher if they're going to die in the second hit. Doing so is like wearing a big "KILL ME" sticker on your face, and even Shadows at this point in the game can be a concrete threat.
Sora's aerial combo is basically the same until you reach the finisher, where he performs a tight spin with his weapon held in close. Unlike his ground combo, this doesn't overextend Sora at all as he recovers the instant he touches hard ground again, so we can firmly establish that Sora is an
aerial character. Any time he has the chance to be in the air, he will. The lack of a recovery time means resuming combos quicker and to more devastating effect, so with only physical attacks available to us at the moment the challenge is getting enemies in the air.
Having foregone
a lot of the tutorial, our first serious fight of the game comes out of the glasswork.
(Stats: 240 HP/2 ATK/2 DEF)
Darkside, as the first boss of the game, is limited in what it can do and isn't a very serious threat because of that. His first attack is to drive his right fist into the ground, manifesting a whirlpool of darkness that spawns three Shadows. If this punch connects it can pretty well halve your HP, but it's easy to avoid.
At this point his fist will remain vulnerable to attack for several seconds, but we have better ways to deal damage. A combination of running and jumping up his arm will give us direct access to Darkside's head; each combo that we complete on his head gives us 2 Tech points.
Tech points are an interesting mechanic. One-for-one, each point of Tech gives you XP, and are awarded mid-battle so you can actually level up during fights rather than after them. I can get a maximum of five combos in on Darkside's head before he pulls back completely, so that's 10 XP right there. The Shadows are each giving 1 XP of their own, so this attack is like a free 14 XP and to level with you, in my final run of this fight I leveled up less than a half minute after the battle began.
In-between attacks Darkside will throw his arms out and roar. This does serve a practical purpose, since it gives you time to clear out the Shadows and buckle down for his next, much more dangerous move.
Darkside's second attack is to kneel down and fire a series of beams from the space where his heart
should be should not and is not. The "standard" strategy is to loiter around where his wrists are, like I am here, and combo them because he's vulnerable for much longer than when punching, but that's not really going to give you the biggest bang for you buck.
By swinging at the apex of each beam's flight when out in the open in front of him, you can repel Darkside's beam for 1 Tech point. Even better, if you're locked onto one of his hands or his head, the reflected beam will home in on that point.
Recall that each hit that connects with Darkside's head awards 2 Tech points, and beam that you repel awards 1. Darkside's finisher for this attack is to launch
three beams. That's 9 tech points for hitting the cross button at the correct moment. This utterly blows away some of the grinding methods I'll be forced to resort to later on. In my final run I leveled up again right after this attack came out, bumping Sora's strength up to 4 while also ending the fight after Darkside got just two attacks in.
...though, let's keep in mind that said strength started at 1. I have the same defense as a level
6 Sora that dropped the shield even so, and everything goes down in the same number of hits at this point anyway, so there's not much to feel bad about.
We end this update as we began it; in darkness.
Well, we're ending it with Sora's baby face.
Next report: Destiny Islands.
